Method to Milngavie: When Work Follows You Into the Highlands

I’m usually hesitant to collapse the distinction between my personal and work life. Even with being fortunate to have work-from-home flexibility, I often chose to go into the office to preserve this boundary. However, as many working in academia can attest to - students, lecturers, professional services staff alike, sometimes your mind decides not to honour that boundary. It insists on seeing work in everything and runs overtime, even with the mindfulness work training or full home life.

I increasingly find this when reading for pleasure, maybe part of it is genuine curiosity but some of it is definitely that persistent attitude of not switching off. I understand that good interdisciplinary research relies on seeing connections and that should be celebrated when practiced - even in daily activities, especially when disciplinarily fences are in fact permeable and arbitrarily placed. But I also want to be able to read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), which I’m currently trudging through, without thinking of work and AI, automation, computational processing etc. beyond the storytelling narrative.

When on leave, my head still takes a few days to fully mellow. I recently had the privilege to walk the entire West Highland Way during a long awaited trip with my Dad, a 96-mile route beginning in the Glasgow suburb of Milngavie and finishing in Fort William after a mad dash around and over the mountains surrounding Kinlochleven. A WhatsApp group saw friends and family eagerly, probably not so eagerly, awaiting updates about where we had reached and in what state. Occasionally, we paused and photographed parts of the route as markers  - with Dad checking Google Photo’s metadata meticulously to ensure that the coordinates, (x, - xxx, y, - xxx), were logged correctly. Over Rannoch Moor for instance, our signal dropped out and we were left with only the image and guessing where we had previously been.

Rannoch Moor, the un-geotagged photo.

With my work head still lingering, I took these actions not as us being over reliant on technology - especially when we consciously limited our screen time and used our phones only for calls and geotagging updates. Instead, I began to link our walk with current work looking at archiving historical live events. 

Dad on his phone, typical, at the Kinghouse Hotel - after walking the 18.9 miles from Tyndrum.

Before the break, I began working on a use case looking at remediating live historical performance with an Italian operatic archive, whereby we would develop co-creative and community methods for retrieving information to aid modern performers’ re-enactments. Despite being digitised to a high standard and serving as vibrant cultural expressions of identity, historical materials related to live performance often remain fragmented and ephemeral in their archival presence. Accordingly, we had begun discussing at the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) how to digitally enable performers’ to authentically interact with, replicate and creatively synthesise historical opera. More closely related to our West Highland Way trip - another project partner for the wider bid had discussed similar methods for distant reading methods for historical travel. 

Archiving travel expeditions - whether the early modern Grand Tour or a walk through the Scottish Highlands, apart from being transient, relies on reconceptualising materials and combining different sources. For our ‘expedition’ we relied not only on geotagged photographs but potential material heritage in water bottles, rucksacks, camping gear and a hip flask of whisky - hic. In terms of intangible heritage we held a non-expert knowledge of the area having walked stretches before (Tyndrum -> Crianlarich, Drymen -> Balmaha) and had accumulated stories from friends, family and my Scottish partner Ella. We came to rely on paper materials in the form of OS materials, which Dad had diligently bought and organised in his bag in route order, as well as Loram and Stedman’s West Highland Way (2022). So - my work head began to ask, how would somebody go about reconstructing our travel? What creative synthesises could be reached? What data would result? What challenges had our use of technology and material heritage presented? What methods would be needed? 

Alongside this, another lingering question remained - certain experiences naturally evoke a research lens even when we’re ‘out of office’. Should we accommodate this just as academic practice or risk burning out and losing the ability to simply be in the moment? I imagine it depends on the field, individual and context - like with all things.

Paddleboarder on Loch Lomond, looks like somebody cracked the work/life balance.

In any case, after thinking about this quite enough, my mind settled down and I enjoyed some of what Scotland had to offer - we even got one sunny day. 

Kinghouse -> Kinlochleven, our one day of sun.